Ex-President Kufuour urges Ghanaian youths to become visionary leaders
Former President John Agyekum-Kufuor on Wednesday tasked the Youths of Ghana to prepare themselves for the challenges of leadership to become visionary leaders through education and negotiation skills.
He said visionary leadership skills were necessary to bring about an enormous change in the lives of people adding, the African continent lacks resourceful leaders to get the transformation it needed.
The former President was speaking at the third Young Professionals Transformational Leadership Conference organized by Young Professionals and Youth Coalition Initiative (YPYC) in Accra.
The theme for this year’s conference was ” Grooming Leaders for the 21st Century Challenges”.
Mr Agyekum-Kuffuor advised the Youths not to disregard the constitution since it served as a guide for every leader who desired to walk on a path worth emulating.
“You cannot be a good leader if you do not master the constitution and allow it to direct you”, he said.
Mr John Dramani Mahama, Vice President, charged the participants to focus on improving upon their knowledge at any given opportunity to meet the challenges of leadership.
He called on them to desist from unnecessary criticism and rather work hard to get inspiration from leaders.
Mrs Mawena Trebarh, Patron of YPYC, said the country needed more transformational leaders to transform situations positively to the benefit of all for development growth.
She said the practice of leadership comes with making tough decisions between competing options like wrong or right which has implications for achieving set goals.
She noted that to strategically position oneself as a young professional to take decisions between competing options, there was the need to know the organization’s values and principles to guide in making right choices.
She stressed that research shows that when leaders live the values and principles of their organizations, they are better positioned to take decisions which are ethically right which helps protect the image of the organization.
Mrs Trebarh noted that the best leaders exhibit both their values and their ethics in their leadership styles and actions.
She explained that ethical leaders embody the purpose, vision, and values of an organization which are useful in managing issues and crises when they arise.
Mrs Trebarh said excelling as exceptional leaders is not only to act ethically but also to take decisions which focus on organizational success rather than on personal ego.
“Acting ethically means creating a culture and sustaining it in an organization with zero tolerance for morally and ethically poor decisions that do no protect the wider interests of the organization,” she added.
Source: GNA